Bastard Nation advocates for the civil and human rights of adult citizens who were adopted as children. Millions are prohibited by law from accessing personal records that pertain to their historical, genetic and legal identities. Such records are held by their governments in secret and without accountability, due solely to the fact that they were adopted.
Bastard Nation campaigns for the restoration of their right to access their records. End a hidden legacy of shame, fear and venality.

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

KAILEE: IF IT SAVES ONLY ONE ….

A few years ago when the Ohio legislature was debating Safe Haven legislation, one of the chief concerns among even the bill’s most ardent supporters was medical history. What happens if a child, abandoned legally, anonymously and with no history, develops a serious medical condition that demands family and genetic history for diagnosis and treatment? One of the dumpster-do-gooders, a neatly dressed woman from Akron, informed a rather discomforted committee, “If the child is sick, he’ll just have to live with it.”

The only problem with that is that some won’t “just have live with it.” They’ll die.

Kailee Wells, 6 was abandoned anonymously in China, At the age of 10 days she was left on the steps of a teacher- training college in impoverished Chandge, Hunan province. After spending the first year of her life in a local orphanage, under the name of Changban (Never Alone) she was adopted by Linda and Owen Wells from Alburquerque, New Mexico. Last year Kailee was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, which prevents the creation of new blood cells. The disease, unless it can be stemmed through a bone marrow transplant, will eventually cause her body’s supply of blood to dry up, and she will die. Blood relatives, especially siblings, offer the greatest donor compatibility, but because she was abandoned anonymously, Kailee has no likely genetic donors. Doctors have searched for a match among 9 million names in global bone marrow donor databases, and have found none. For the last year she has been kept alive by blood transfusions, chemotherapy and steroids. Kailee will die within months if a compatible donor cannot be found.

This week, Linda Wells left the critically ill Kailee in New Mexico to make a desperate journey to China in a last ditch attempt to save her daughter’s life. The Chinese Red Cross, in an unprecedented publicity campaign and with only three days notice, has launched the largest bone marrow donor drive in the country’s history with plenty of domestic and international media coverage. Officials expect thousands of people “touched by the love story” to volunteer in a long-shot attempt to find a donor. Soon Linda Wells will visit Chandge hoping to locate Kailee’s biological family. It is unclear, however, if Chinese welfare officials will help or hinder her search. They have so far refused to waive the child abandonment penalties, including fines and imprisonment, that could be brought against her biological parents if they come forward to save her.

Baby abandonment in China is illegal, yet over-population, rural poverty, the one-child policy and other coercive reproductive practices as well as the thousands-year old tradition of female infant abandonment, make anonymous, secret abandonment inevitable. The United States suffers no such disability, has no such excuse. Yet to date 42 states have passed Safe Haven laws, which permit “legal” newborn abandonment. Many states make no provision for collection of medical and genetic histories; all support and encourage the creation, on purpose, of undocumented, unhistoried and dehistoried children like Kailee.

Linda Wells knows she’s shooting against the odds, but says, “We are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep our baby girl alive…..At least we’ll know we did everything possible, everything within our power, to save our little girl.”

Safe Haven advocates, especially in those states where bills are currently pending, need to take a long hard look at Kailee.

Sunday, February 16, 2003

Choose Life License Plates are Not About Adoption

I strongly oppose the "Choose Life" license plate program that is being introduced in various states across our nation. The Choose Life, Inc. organization wants us to believe that it supports adoption. They tell us, "The Choose Life license plate is "coming of age" in 2003. Adoption is surely the answer to the tragedy of abortion."

Indeed it is not!

Historically, adoption is the process of finding homes for children who need them. Adoption is NOT about filling up homes of infertile couples. Adoption is NOT to promote the welfare of birth mothers. And adoption is NOT a way to prevent abortions. It is first, foremost and always a system to benefit live children who need families. Adoption is not and never has been a system to find homes for fetuses.

Mr.Jim Finnegan of the Illinois Choose Life program wrote these words in a recent Chicago Tribune " Voice of the People" article: "The license plates would have the words 'Choose Life' on them because this is what the birth mother wants to give to adopting parents." Mr. Finnegan wants us to believe that all birth mothers want their children to be adopted and therefore, state revenue should support them in this process.

The Choose Life folks conveniently forget to tell us about the thousands of young women all over this country who find themselves in crises pregnancies and want desperately to keep their children. They do not want their children to be adopted. . They do not want to "give" anything to adopting parents. What they do want is to be able to raise their own children. The only thing that is keeping them from that choice is money. Would the "Choose Life" license plates program give financial support to birth mothers who want to keep their children? Of course not.

I am all for raising funds to help children in need of homes. I was once a child without a home. Thanks to the system of adoption, a wonderful adoptive home was found for me.

If Choose Life, Inc. wants to raise money for adoption, then let them design a license plate that says, "Support Adoption," and earmark all of the revenue towards finding homes for children who are alive today and who need families.

Thursday, February 13, 2003

On January 13, 2003, Bastard Nation joined France's adoptee rights organization Les X-en-Colore--Angry X--in a demonstration in Strasbourg, to support French adoptee Pascale Odievre and her suit to overturn her country's Accouchement sous X laws.These X laws, permit women to give birth anonymously and allow parents to expunge their identity from all medical and official records. Since their establishment in 1941, hundreds of thousands of men and women have been "born under X" anonymously. The legacy of the X laws can be found in the United States with the passage in 42 states of Safe Haven laws which permit the "legal abandonment" of newborns anonymously. Bastard Nation is happy and proud to support Angry X in their struggle for their records and their identites. Below is the text of our remarks

THE STRASBOURG STATEMENT

Greetings from the United States! Greetings from Canada! Greetings from Bastard Nation!

It is an honor to be here today to support Pascale Odievre and Les X-en Colere in their battle to overturn the archaic Accouchement sous X laws which for decades have allowed the state to confiscate and hide the identity of hundreds of thousands of French citizens whose only crime was to be born inconveniently. We inconvenient Bastards in North America have watched closely your struggle and stand in solidarity with you our sisters and brothers.

As you may know, since 1999, 42 states in the US have passed laws similar to your X laws. (Canada has no such laws yet, but there will no doubt be an attempt to enact them there soon.)

Though the details of our own X laws--so-called Safe Haven laws--vary from state to state, they all include provisions which permit parents to “drop off” an “unwanted infant” at a Safe Haven center (hospital emergency room, fire station, police station or even a church or an adoption agency.) For those parents who are too afraid to abandon their baby in person, organizations have been established that will pick up the baby and then abandoned it for them! In at least three states, a Safe Haven is designated as “any reasonable person!” No questions are asked. No identification is required. No social or medical history is necessary.

Safe Havens are advertised as “No Blame, No Shame, No Name.” In some states, brochures, flyers, and posters are distributed in schools, churches, and places where teenagers meet to inform girls “it’s OK to dump your baby.” In some cities, stickers pleading, “Don’t throw your baby away” are glued to trash bins. In California “baby abandonment education” has been introduced into the school curriculum so everybody will know that it is not only OK to abandon your baby with no blame, no shame, no name, but that the state wants you to do it.

Unlike in France, laws in the US have not yet been passed which permit the identity of parents to be expunged from all medical and official state records, but these proposals cannot be far behind. We believe that the next step will be laws that permit women who promise to put their babies up for adoption instead of killing them (what little respect these people have for women!) to give birth not only anonymously, but at tax payer’s expense.

Recently, a leading Safe Haven advocate published an Internet essay attacking Pacale’s lawsuit, calling it an assault on the right of “anonymous choice.” He took the extraordinary measure of defending the Vichy government—not exactly known for its humanitarian impulses-- claiming the Vichy X laws were an” humanitarian” attempt to protect women and children from persecution and humiliation after liberation--a liberation that in 1941 was not even a bad dream for these guys. If one wants to believe this piece of nonsense (and we don’t!) then why is a law enacted by the Vichy government to protect itself from the consequences of rape and other sexual crimes perpetrated on the female population by its Nazi associates, remaining in place more than 60 years later? Very simple. Because once identity erasure became institutionalized, it became normalized giving the new government the same benefits that it gave the Vichy government: The X laws maintained bourgeois standards of family honor, paternity and sexuality. The X laws obscured criminal and abusive sexual relationships. The X Laws relegated and continue to relegate the victims and their offspring, not to mention just plain inconvenient children, as official state secrets.

Are you a state secret?

In France and the US, the same people cry the dire consequences if anonymous abandonment is not permitted. The Church, showing little respect for women or understanding of crisis pregnancy, says women will kill their babies if they can’t abandon them with no blame, no shame, no name. Feminists, who should know better, insist that “maternal secrecy” is a reproductive right like birth control or abortion. No! Anonymous abandonment is not a reproductive right. A baby has been born, a person with a right to identity and heritage. The adoption industry declares that anonymous abandonment protects women and children. How does a system that not only encourages secrecy and government cover-up, but discourages prenatal and post- natal care protect women and children?

Crisis pregnancy, poverty, substance abuse, domestic violence, denial, shame, and mental illness are the real causes of child abandonment. X laws, and Safe Haven laws create a “trouble-free” policy that turns its back on the very women and children they purport to help. The Safe Haven promoter just mentioned says that anonymous abandonment is a response to the growing open records and identity rights movement in the US, which he sees as an assault on “the privacy of women.” He refers to Safe Havens as "non-bureaucratic [adoption] placement" for parents who find best practice standards such as informed consent, counseling and even paper-signing, too confusing and complicated. There is not one iota of evidence to suggest that those babies surrendered anonymously under Safe Haven laws were in danger of neglect, mistreatment or death. Parents whose newborns are truly at risk continue to harm.

Today Bastard Nation stands in solidarity with those throughout the world whose identity has been stolen, hidden, and obliterated by archaic laws and public policy, social engineering, and government malfeasance. We stand with The Disappeared of Central and South America and their Abuelas. We stand with The Lost Generations of Australia. We stand with those undocumented children sold in the international and domestic black markets of the world. We stand with the stolen children of Guatemala and Cambodia. We stand with those conceived through anonymous high-tech reproductive procedures with its anonymous donors that rob them of all chance of identity recovery. We stand with those adopted in Canada and the US and other countries where records are confiscated and sealed and in any other country where identity is erased for state convenience. And we stand proudly in solidarity today with Pascale Odievre, and Les X-en-Colere.